Critical Notes: Parsons on Evolution

While over the past few decades there have been forceful advocates of an evolutionary standpoint, such as Leslie White, it would probably be true to say that their work has not made a substantial impact upon theoretical thinking in the social sciences. It is therefore of some interest that one of the major contributors to such thinking, Talcott Parsons, should have sought to breathe fresh life into evolutionary theory, albeit only in the later development of his work. Since Parsons's account of evolutionism has indeed mobilized considerable support, I shall consider it in some detail here.

Social evolution, Parsons argues, is an extension of biological evolution, even if dependent upon substantially different mech­anisms. There is no reason to assume that there is a sudden break between biological and social evolution. The `watershed between subhuman and human', as Parsons calls it, marks a phase in a very long-term process of development. Both forms of evolution can be understood in terms of universals — `evolutionary universals'. An evolutionary universal, in Parsons's terminology, is any type of development `sufficiently important to further evolution' that it is likely to crop up on more than one occasion in different conditions.' ' Vision is offered as an example of an evolutionary universal in the sphere of the organic world. The capability of vision allows for a wider range of co-ordinating responses to the surrounding environment and thus has great adaptive value. Vision has not emerged only in one part of the animal kingdom but has come about independently in phyla: molluscs, insects and vertebrates. The visual organs of these groups are not of a single anatomical form and cannot be regarded as belonging to a single evolutionary process, but vision does seem to be a prerequisite for all higher levels of biological evolution.

The biological potential of human beings for social evolution depends upon the evolutionary universals of the hands and the

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*References may be found on pp. 279-80.

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brain. Having independently movable fingers and an opposing thumb allows for an extraordinary variety of manipulations of objects in conjunction with arms having mobile joints. The human brain is so much more developed than those of other species that it makes possible the mastery of modes of activity and of cognition unknown among the lower animals, above all the capacity for the creation and use of language. These traits give human beings adaptive advantages over the other species. The concept of adaptation, Parsons claims, is essential to both biological and social evolution. Adaptation, he says, should not be understood to mean just the passive adjusting of a given species or type of social system to environmental conditions but should include more active survival factors. The adaptation of a living system' can involve `an active concern with mastery, or the ability to change the environment to meet the needs of the system, as well as an ability to survive in the face of its unalterable features'.² This often means the capacity to cope with a range of environmental challenges, and especially with circumstances that provoke uncertainty. An evolutionary universal, in sum, is any organic or social trait which augments the long-run adaptive capabilities of a living system to such a degree that it becomes a prerequisite for higher levels of development. There is only one major difference between biological and social evolutionary universals: the first are not open to diffusion, while the second are. Thus the conditions under which an adaptive advantage originates may be different from those which facilitate its later adoption by other social groupings.

Human beings live in societies and create cultures. The symbolic aspects of culture, as Parsons describes them, are vital to adaptation. The `symbol' replaces the gene as the chief organizing component of social evolution. Although based upon a set of general organic capabilities, the symbolic qualities of social systems have to be learned anew by each generation. `Cultural orientations' do not implement themselves as genetic programmes do. Communication is the basis of culture and language the basis of communication. Language is thus an elementary evolutionary universal; there is no known human society which does not possess a language. According to Parsons, symbol systems have a directive role both in social organization generally and in social change. This is because they are at the top of a cybernetic hierarchy in human societies. In Parsons's `action

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scheme' they rank above the social system, personality and the organism. The physical environment conditions, or sets limits to, the modes of conduct formed within societies, but it is the cultural system which most directly regulates them.'

In its earliest forms culture is more or less synonymous with religion. Religion, Parsons argues, is one of four evolutionary universals found in `even the simplest action system'. The others are communication through language plus kinship and technology: `their presence constitutes the very minimum that may be said to mark a society as truly human.'⁴ These relate to the overall properties of action and thus to the general framework of biological evolution. Evolution away from the most elemental types of action system can be analysed as a process of progressive differentiation, which refers to functional specialization. Differen­tiation can lead — although not inevitably — to increased adaptive capacity in respect of each specific function that is separated out, a process of `adaptive upgrading'. The lines along which differentiation proceeds can be worked out in these terms. Given the cybernetic nature of social systems, these lines must be functional. The increasing complexity of systems, in so far as it is not due only to segmentation, involves the development of subsystems specialized about more specific functions in the operation of the system as a whole and of integrative mechanisms which interrelate the functionally differentiated subsystems.' These subsystems — pattern maintenance, integration, polity and economy — are the basis of Parsons's analysis.

In the simplest types of society, primitive society, the four subsystems show only a very low level of differentiation. Primitive societies are characterized by a specific system of `constitutive symbolism', which accords the group a definite cultural identity, separate from others. Such symbolism is always directly connected with kinship relations — for example, in the form of a myth of ancestral gods who founded the community. The myth both unites the group and provides an interpretative framework for coping with the exigencies of, and threats from, the natural world. One of the distinguishing features of primitive societies is that constitutive symbolism is comprehensively involved in the various spheres of life. It enters into religious, moral and technological activities, permeating them and rendering them part of a cohesive social unity. Parsons takes as an example (as Durkheim did) the aboriginal societies of Australia. The social

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organization of these Australian societies consists almost wholly of kinship relations and the modes in which they articulate with totemic practices, exchange relations and transactions with the environment. Economic aspects of the latter are of the `simplest sort', depending upon hunting and the gathering of berries, roots and various sorts of edible insects. The tribal groups range over fairly broad tracts of territory, and although their constitutive symbolism has definite territorial reference, there are no clearly defined territorial boundaries between different groups. While kinship relations are of essential importance, there is no vertical differentiation between kin units; no set of clans has markedly greater power, wealth or religious prominence than any other. The Australian societies are functionally differentiated by gender and by age, but otherwise they consist of equivalent segmental groupings linked by kinship ties.

The most primitive societies, such as the Australian groups, can be distinguished from the `advanced primitive type'. The transition is marked by the breakdown of equivalence between kinship groups. This may happen when one group manages to secure resources which allow it to control the formation of marriage ties; these resources may then be used to accumulate material wealth and other bases of power. A tendency to the vertical differentiation of society replaces the more egalitarian character of the simpler societies. Economic change is associated with such a process: settled residence, agricultural or pastoral production replace the more errant procedures of hunting and gathering. There is still not a differentiated `economy', but enhanced material productivity creates economic pressures towards the consolidation of property rights and stability of territorial control. However it may come about, stratification is the first and most basic evolutionary universal in the transition from more to less primitive societies. Stratification tends first of all to emerge through the elevation of one lineage to a privileged rank; the senior individual in that lineage then usually takes the title of monarch. Advanced primitive societies are considerably more heterogeneous than their forerunners, involving ethnic, religious and other oppositions, as well as class divisions. The African kingdoms, such as the Zulu, are the prime examples of societies of this type. Parsons accepts that in the Zulu kingdom, and in others resembling it, military power was of major

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significance in shaping and consolidating the social order. But he emphasizes that probably of greater importance was the formation of a developed religious culture, legitimizing the position of the king and fostering social solidarity.

Advanced primitive societies, however, still belong to the first phase of evolution which Parsons distinguishes. The second is that of `intermediate' societies, which contain two subtypes, the `archaic' and the `advanced intermediate'. Both are associated with the existence of writing. Archaic societies are characterized only by what Parsons calls `craft literacy', that is, writing which is used mainly for administrative accounting and for the codification of magical and religious precepts. Literacy is the prerogative of small priestly groups and not part of the general education of the dominant class or classes. Ancient Egypt offers an example of an archaic society. A society of this type has a `cosmological' religious order, which both generalizes and systematizes constitutive symbolism more than in primitive communities. It has a political and administrative apparatus, separated out in some degree from religious duties. Archaic societies have adaptive qualities superior to those of primitive ones because they concentrate functional responsibility in the domains of the religious and the political. These factors are further developed in the advanced intermediate type of society, which consists of `historic empires' such as Rome or China. All of these have been deeply involved with the `world religions' of which Max Weber wrote. They are characterized by the massive scale of their cultural innovations as a result of `philosophic breakthroughs' which distinguish between the sacred and the material world; kings are no longer gods.

Specialized cultural legitimation is one evolutionary universal that is brought into sharp definition by the advent of historic empires. Its focus is political, it being the means of the consolidation of governmental authority. `Meeting the legitimation need' implies the emergence of specialized political leaders in addition to the ruler.

Over an exceedingly wide front and relatively independently of particular cultural variations, political leaders must in the long run have not only sufficient power, but also legitimation for it. . . . The combination of differentiated cultural patterns of legitimation with socially differentiated agencies is the essential aspect of the evolutionary universal of legitimation.'

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A second evolutionary universal is the emergence of bureaucratic organization. Accepting Weber's thesis concerning the indispens­ability of bureaucracy for the effective large-scale mobilization of power, Parsons argues that advanced intermediate societies show a wide expansion of the administrative co-ordination of govern-ment, armed forces and other differentiated institutional sectors. A third universal introduced by historic empires is the use of money in relation to market exchange. Market exchange, according to Parsons, is a system of power that avoids some of the `dilemmas' of political power. Political power depends ultimately upon punitive sanctions imposed by an administrative body; money shares some of the qualities of political power but is a more generalized resource which is spread among `consumers' as well as `producers', a resource that emancipates people both from loyalty to specific political groups and from ascriptive kinship ties. But these three evolutionary universals all presuppose a fourth: `a highly generalized universalistic normative order',' exemplified in a system of law. However, this brings us to the threshold of modernity because some historic empires have developed bureaucratic organization and markets to a fairly high degree without a comparable extension of forms of generalized law.

The development of the modern West, the highest evolutionary form in Parsons's scheme, is related to two `seed-bed' societies that had a specific long-range influence, Israel and Greece. (A symptomatic comment here is: `Buddhism is by far the most conspicuous cultural complex mentioned so far that had its most profound influence outside the society in which it originated. But because it did not lead towards modernity and because it had little basic significance for Western society, we have not discussed it extensively.')" How did some of the cultural features of these two societies become so widely diffused from their points of origin? And what made possible the cultural innovations which they produced? As regards the second of these questions, Parsons argues that in fact only small societies with a reasonable degree of political independence could have given rise to such cultural novelty. It could not have come about in large empires with their extended territory and variety of competing interests. The first problem is solved precisely by the subsequent loss of indepen­dence on the part of both societies: their cultural innovations

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became taken up by important strata within larger social entities. Judaic and Greek culture was adopted largely by `scholar classes' rather than by dominant political groups; subsequently these cultural influences became the `principal societal anchorages' of established traditions in the West. The modern type of society has emerged in this `single evolutionary area', the West.`'

The emergence of Western society, Parsons asserts, represents a further breakthrough in adaptive capacity as compared with intermediate societies. The features of the West permitting greater differentiation than could be achieved hitherto include the further development of markets, the universalization of law and democratic association involving citizenship rights for the mass of the population. Taken together, these have furthered the consolidation of the `territorial unity' of societies having their own clear boundaries. The development of universalized law can be traced through the articulation of Continental Roman law and English common law. The second is most important in terms of facilitating freedom of contract and the protection of private property. It is, Parsons says, `the most important single hallmark of modern society'; the English legal order was `a fundamental prerequisite of the first occurrence of the Industrial Revolution'.<sup>10</sup> It is also the condition of the development of mass democracy. Democracy is in turn the condition of the effective exercise of power in a highly differentiated society. Those societies which do not become democratic, including `communist totalitarian organizations', will not have the adaptive advantages of those that do. Which society is farthest along the evolutionary route today? Why, the United States! A comforting, if not especially original, conclusion for an American sociologist to reach after a grand survey of human evolution as a whole."

This sounds like the sort of thing that gets sociology a bad name — at least in the remainder of the world. It might be tempting to ignore it on the basis of the qualification that Parsons adds towards the conclusion of his work on evolution: that the reader should not be too concerned about the detail of his discussion because what matters is `the idea of the evolutionary universal and its grounding in the conception of generalized adaptive capacity'.¹² In general I shall indeed observe this recommendation, but, as I shall indicate, Parsons's approbation of the USA is entirely in line with his version of evolutionary thought.

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Parsons's theory meets all of the criteria I have mentioned as distinctive of evolutionism. Evolution, he makes clear, is more than just `history', and his account claims social and biological evolution to be both conceptually and substantially connected. The familiar notion of adaptation once more makes its appearance. Parsons specifies the progression in which he is most interested (the differentiation of institutions) and has an overall interpretation of the mechanics of change that depends upon the `cybernetic' influence of values and symbols. It also displays several of the secondary weaknesses of evolutionary thought and by no means watches the red light carefully enough to avoid the mishaps to which evolutionary theories are so often subject.

Parsons attaches considerable importance to the idea that social evolution is an extension of biological evolution. Now, there is obviously a sense in which this thesis is unobjectionable. After all, it seems to be the case that physical characteristics of the body (a large and neurologically complex brain, upright posture and so on) were the precondition for the developments of human society. The early development of human social associa­tion and culture was probably a survival trait allowing for the evolutionary success of Homo sapiens. But what follows from this if we discount the aesthetic appeal of a theory that explains biological and social development with a single set of concepts? The answer is: nothing. Biological evolution has to do with changes in heredity, in the genetic traits of succeeding generations; these are explained economically and effectively by a small number of relatively simple mechanisms. Social evolution con­cerns the relations both between human societies and the material environment and between such societies. The characterization of `evolution' cannot aptly be accorded to these phenomena, nor can a given sequence of changes be explained in `evolutionary' fashion, unless the operation of similar mechanisms be demon­strated. Parsons's theory is typical of evolutionary accounts in arguing as if such a demonstration were given by the (undeniable) fact that biological evolution has been interconnected with the early development of human culture. What should be shown with evidence is taken as if it were a source of evidence.

The concept of adaptation which Parsons introduces is as vague and all-embracing as any in the literature, although it is not thereby untypical. Adaptation, he makes clear, has something to

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do with `survival' and something to do with interaction with the material world but is by no means limited to these. It is more broadly connected with the reduction of uncertainty — an idea Parsons borrows from systems theory, as he does that of the cybernetic influence of symbols and values. But since `uncertainty' is nowhere defined, the thesis either is conceptually so diffuse as to be virtually useless or, if pushed more towards a definite empirical content, seems to be at best implausible. Suppose we take two senses Parsons may have in mind: the reduction of uncertainties about the vagaries of nature and the reduction of uncertainties in respect of future events. Neither seems even to advance unequivocally with the types of society Parsons portrays along his evolutionary scale, let alone contribute to their differential `survival'. Increased control over the material environ­ment, yielded by technological development or the manipulation of authoritative resources, is by no means the same as reduced uncertainty of outcomes. A technologically more `effective' farmer, for example, might be more vulnerable to variations in the weather than a hunter and gatherer. As regards the reduction of future unpredictabilities, who could suppose that the world in which we now live, with its massive yet fluctuating rates of technological and economic change, political uncertainties and the presence of nuclear weaponry, is less uncertain than that of palaeolithic humanity?

Moreover, the guiding mechanism of evolution that Parsons ties to the increasing adaptive capacity of his evolutionary universals — the cybernetic control yielded by constitutional symbolism — is surely quite unconvincing. Parsons evidently establishes this approach in conscious opposition to historical materialism, and other theories which he takes to resemble it in holding that technology, or economic organization more generally, are the leading forces influencing social change. But it is no more plausible than are the theories he opposes. Once more an argument by analogy seems to be confused with the production of evidence. In mechanical control systems cybernetic controls of low energy can govern movements involving much greater energy expenditure. Parsons then compares this with the control of the gene over protein synthesis and other aspects of cell metabolism, as if the latter example somehow added weight to his argument about the controlling influence of `constitutive symbolism' over

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social change. The supposed conceptual parallel does double duty. It is appealed to as a source of the thesis of the controlling position of symbols and values, but then Parsons also writes as though it also in some way helped validate that thesis.

Suppose it were the case that the scheme of adaptive capacity plus the `cybernetic' influence of constitutive symbolism did provide a general explanatory framework for social evolution roughly analogous to that by means of which biologists explain natural evolution. The problem of what `survival' means in the case of human societies, an issue that must be coupled in some degree with that of what a `society' is, would still demand much more attention than Parsons gives them. In biological evolution survival and extinction are exclusive and clear alternatives, being linked to the conditions that determine differential reproduction. A population which cannot effectively compete for the environ­mental inputs it needs cannot transmit its genes and hence dies out. But there is no real analogue to these circumstances in the social world. If adaptive capacity is defined so widely as to include mobilization for war, the social units clearly often fail to `adapt' in so far as they are subjugated or destroyed by others. But whole types of society do not usually die out in this way. Moreover, if colonized or subordinated to other groups, rather than being wiped out, pre-existing forms of social organization often continue to exist in recognizably similar guise within an altered social context. The question of whether they have managed to `survive' or not then turns a good deal upon what we decide is a `society' or the appropriate unit of analysis for evolutionary study. Parsons begs the question in large part by building an answer to it into his actual classification of societies. It is a mark of evolutionary inferiority that `primitive societies' lack clearly defined boundaries." An alternative view of the matter, however, would be that the definition of what is to count as a distinct `society' is more difficult to formulate than Parsons presumes it to be — until, at least, one approaches the era of modern nation-states.

Parsons's theory exemplifies nearly all the damaging tendencies to which I have suggested evolutionary accounts are typically subject. It presents, seemingly without qualms, a `world-growth story'; it slips into unilineal compression; and it almost makes a deliberate virtue of what I have called the normative illusion.

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Symptomatic of Parsons's particular `world-growth story' is the discussion provided of `primitive societies'. Parsons rather casually mentions that the Aboriginal societies of Australia are `among the most primitive societies known'<sup>14</sup> without much further elaboration. He thinks of them at the lowest end of the scale, he makes it clear, in terms of their lack of differentiation, low development of the economy and pre-eminence of kinship. But what of the complexity of the kinship system, the richness of Australian cultural productions of ritual and art? These go virtually unmentioned because Parsons makes the typical evolutionary elision between `primitiveness' on certain dimensions, such as technology, and `primitiveness' of societies as a whole. What of the tremendous diversity of small oral cultures that have existed across time and space, rightly emphasized by the `cultural relativists'?'⁵ If Parsons were concerned only with formulating a conception of general evolution (that is, if he were not an evolutionist at all, in my understanding of the term), lack of reference to such diversity, and to the fact that these societies have dominated most of human history, could perhaps be justified. But he is certainly interested in specific evolution too, trying to indicate the main direction of change whereby `primitive societies' become transformed into `advanced primitive societies' and these into systems of the `intermediate' type.

Unilineal compression is evident in Parsons's account of the impact of the `seed-bed' societies, where there is a marked shift in the forms of his discussion. Whereas in relation to foregoing evolutionary types Parsons ranges over vast expanses of history, in analysing the rise of the West his discussion inevitably becomes narrower in its emphasis. It is surely unconvincing to suppose that the cultural inheritances from Israel and Greece necessarily have greater adaptive value than other borrowings which might have been made from elsewhere. The fact that they did become embodied within European culture indicates nothing about their evolutionary value, as Parsons has earlier specified it. Parsons here reads `evolutionary necessity' (the claim that one type of societal organization shows traits that have to appear before a `higher' type can come into being) into `historical necessity' (the circumstance that since the designated elements did become part of European society, things `must' have happened in that way).

Finally, normative illusion. Parsons's view that half a million

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years of human history culminate in the social and political system of the United States would be more than faintly ridiculous if it did not conform quite neatly to his particular `world-growth story'. It is given whatever specious appeal it might have by its connection with the theme of increasing adaptive capacity associated with evolution. Although Parsons might claim that his interpretation is strictly analytical and carries no evaluative overtones, such is palpably not the case. If, for example, `democracy' is defined in a specific way, as more or less equivalent to `liberal democracy as exemplified by the political order of the United States', and if `democracy' is made into an evolutionary universal for societies on the highest level of evolution, then what other conclusion can there be other than that which Parsons draws? But it is as empty as most of the tenets of evolutionism tend to be.